Both as a film and as a work of film criticism, Thom Andersen's "Los Angeles
Plays Itself" remains an outlier, even though the cinematic form it proposes
wouldn't be hard to generalize, or even popularize. Andersen's take on the
practice of film studies more than once recalls Mike Davis' approach to the
discipline of urbanism in "City of Quartz", whose tagline, "Excavating the
future in Los Angeles", would fit Andersen's film just as well. He enters the
field sideways, digs for a much deeper history of the city than the one we
think we know, finds much darker mirror images of its cinematic representation
than the ones we think we've seen, and in that process develops a mode of
storytelling which, while its result has often and rightfully been described as
"epic", never hides the author's personal investment, and never loses its
polemical edge. Andersen breaks with the canon of cinema (his disses of Alfred
Hitchcock's and Woody Allen's excursions to Southern California resonate with
Mike Davis' critique of Adorno's and Horkheimer's perspective as exiles in
Santa Monica: the city appears shallow only to those who remain tourists,
voluntarily segregated from proletarian urban life), deconstructs some of the
most famous accounts of corruption in Los Angeles (most notably the fake
historicity of "Chinatown" and "L.A. Confidential"), and manages to turn some
of Hollywood's most iconic monuments upside down (for example by unearthing the
utopian urban vision of "Blade Runner", its vibrant street life and absence of
traffic jams). Andersen has collected such an enormous amount of material that
he can often just arrange it in a way that makes it speak for itself (alone the
section in which he chronicles Hollywood's hatred for modernist architecture by
means of a long montage of movie villains in their hillside villas is worth
more than the price of admission), and while he relies heavily on his B-roll to
make some of the film's central arguments (from H.B. Halicki's "Gone in 60
Seconds" and Rick King's "A Passion to Kill" to Fred Halperin's gay porn movie
that the film derives its title from), he avoids the nerdy eclecticism of "Pulp
Fiction", from which he distances himself rather explicitely. At its core, "Los
Angeles Plays Itself" is a film about class relations -- not about race, and
definitely not about gender -- and even though the 1943 Zoot Suit Riots, the
1965 Watts Riots and the 1992 Rodney King Riots all make their appearance, they
remain on the periphery of the story, until more than two and a half hours into
the film, the non-white protagonists finally take over (via Kent MacKenzie's
"The Exiles", Haile Gerima's "Bush Mama" and Charles Burnett's "Killer of
Sheep") and provide Andersen's journey with a short but alternative ending.